A Taste of the Berry 0.65

Berry Linux released version .65 yesterday or so and I thought I'd take a look. This release brings some updated applications and services, but overall, it's basically looks about the same with the same boot splash, kde splash and kitten wallpaper. This time we have linux 2.6.14.1, gcc 4.0.2, and KDE 3.5.

Berry is a livecd, appearing to be based on Knoppix startup scripts, yet it had fedora core packages. It is primarily for the Japanese language speaking world, but it has support for English as well. It is invoked at boot up with the option LANG=us. This is also where I put my "xmodule=vesa" or else Xorg 6.8.2 would lock up.

Berry is released in about a 450mb iso, featuring KDE as the default, if not only, desktop. The menu was quite limited as they had stripped kde to little more than the basics and then featured gaim (which would not open here), thunderbird and firefox (v1.5) as the primary internet applications. It did include gimp, which was good considering it didn't even have ksnapshot. There were a few configurations, some graphic applications, a few games, and some sound and video apps.

There were no common plugins or java support included, however the mplayer did a good job of playing movie files on hand. Demonstrated in the following screenshots are mplayer playing an avi, a mpeg, and a bin file.

Berry ships with OpenOffice.org 2.0, PlanMaker demo, and TextMaker demo. I always liked the *Makers because despite their wonderful functionality and built-in features, they are quite lightweight and small in size. I can even run them on my old laptop. The only drawbacks for the given market are they aren't open sourced, lack the really advanced functions I'd never use, and cost like 50 bucks for the full version. Actually the demos are the full versions, they are just time-limited.

Berry comes with its own Berry Control Center. It's not too extensive at this time, but it does include a netconfig, hostname config, and a package updater. It is an attractive piece of software, perhaps they plan to add more features as time goes by.

There was a hard drive installer included as well. It was the Kanotix hard drive installer that we've seen before in symphony, kurumin, and very similar to arabian's. If you've not see it, it basically walks the user through the configuration by asking a few simple questions. The full process is shown in the screenshots. It worked good and completed the install without incident here today.

Hardware detection was a bit spotty as well. Artsd didn't function at all although it appeared some snd_emu10k1 drivers were inserted. It detected my crt-1 first before (actually instead of) my crt-0 which put the wrong modelines and resolution in the xorg.conf file. Given this, I was stuck in 1024x768. My webcam and bttv are rarely if ever detected properly. It did not see my printer at all, as if it wasn't even connected and turned on. I didn't check on the scanner, but then again, I didn't see any software for it anyway.

The list of applications were limited but Berry Linux is a nice little distro featuring a pretty look and some necessary basics. I congratulate and thank any developer for making Linux available to other languages and Berry's a great effort for the Japanese market. More Screenshots.

More in Tux Machines

today's leftovers

For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.
Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year.
(At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.)
Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there?
Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how.
It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk.
A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.
In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

The KDE Community has just announced the wider integration of Matrix instant messaging into its communications infrastructure. There are instructions on the KDE Community Wiki as well.
So what’s the state of modern chat with KDE-FreeBSD?
The web client works pretty well in Falkon, the default browser in a KDE Plasma session on FreeBSD. I don’t like leaving browsers open for long periods of time, so I looked at the available desktop clients. Porting Quaternion to FreeBSD was dead simple. No compile warnings, nothing, just an hour of doing some boilerplate-ish things, figuring out which Qt components are needed, and doing a bunch of test builds. So that client is now available from official FreeBSD ports. The GTK-based client Fractal was already ported, so there’s choices available for native-desktop applications over the browser or Electron experience.

If you followed Kdenlive’s activity these last years, you know that we dedicated all our energy into a major code refactoring. During this period, which is not the most exciting since our first goal was to simply restore all the stable version’s features, we were extremely lucky to see new people joining the core team, and investing a lot of time in the project.
We are now considering to release the updated version in April, with KDE Applications 19.04. There are still a few rough edges and missing features (with many new ones added as well), but we think it now reached the point where it is possible to start working with it.

Preliminary Support Allows Linux KVM To Boot Xen HVM Guests

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.
The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

Servers: Kubernetes, SUSE Enterprise Storage and Microsoft/SAP

One of the questions I get asked quite often by people who are just starting or are simply not used to the “new” way things are done in IT is, “What is the cloud?” This, I think, is something you get many different answers to depending on who you ask. I like to think of it this way: The cloud is a grouping of resources (compute, storage, network) that are available to be used in a manner that makes them both highly available and scalable, either up or down, as needed. If I have an issue with a resource, I need to be able to replace that resource quickly — and this is where containers come in. They are lightweight, can be started quickly, and allow us to focus a container on a single job. Containers are also replaceable. If I have a DB container, for instance, there can’t be anything about it that makes it “special” so that when it is replaced, I do not lose operational capability.

As your data needs continue to expand, it’s important to have a storage solution that’s both scalable and easy to manage. That’s particularly true when you’re managing common gateway resources like iSCSI that provide interfaces to storage pools built in Ceph. In this white paper, you’ll see how to use the SUSE Enterprise Storage openATTIC management console to create RADOS block devices (RBDs), pools and iSCSI interfaces for use with Linux, Windows and VMware systems.